The first part of this article, Beginner’s Guide to SharePoint Web Content Management (Part I), covers the basics. While, if you are anything like me, you will undoubtedly want to get to the meat of this, I do caution you to take a little time and study the foundation. As strange as it may sound, I find that working in team environments where something as simple as vocabulary has not been established, it is very difficult to interoperate with everyone else: even if you are the expert.

That being said, we still want to get moving! So, let's proceed.

Creating a Web Application

I will make the assumption that you have already installed and configured Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for this example. In doing so, you should have the ability to access your primary server's "Central Administration" utility (called Central Admin from here on out). If you do not know how to access it, it can be opened from the server's Start menu:

Start Menu --> All Programs --> Microsoft Office Server --> SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration

When you open it, you should get a window like in Figure 1.0. If you are not familiar with Central Admin, I would advise that you take time to explore the links and the options they provide. Most tasks involving server configuration, site creation, and maintenance will be done through this utility. If you are moving in the direction of implementing a new site, I guarantee this will become very familiar territory in no time.

As you will see, there are three tabs that make up the Central Admin interface. The first tab is called “Home”. This area is mostly informational and not often used. There is a task list here that is often useful when you first configure the server to tell you the tasks that you need to complete in order to have a successful installation. Hopefully, this is already done as it falls under the assumption I stated before that the servers are installed and configured prior to this exercise. If they are not, this would be a good time to talk to your network administrator to get that done.

The second tab, called Operations, is where we setup server related services and jobs. These include the services that run on which members of the farm, access mappings, backup / restore, and content deployment, just to list a few. The third tab, Application Management is where we setup Site / Web related services. Let’s go ahead and select this tab as shown in Figure 1.0

Figure 1.0 – Central Administration Screen

The first thing we need to do to setup our first Publishing site is to create a Web Application. A lot of people get confused between web applications, site collections, sites, and extended web applications. Let’s take a moment to understand them fully.

Web Application:

The best way to think of a web application is to view it as a container for your site collection(s). A web application is basically, the mechanics needed to view your site collection. It configures the Internet Information Server (IIS) website, the appropriate port number, the host header (think domain name used to access your site through IIS). A web application can, and often does, contain more than one site collection. However, it can only have one “root” level collection.

A root level site collection will be the parent collection for all other sites. It will also be access by default at the root of website name that the web application is configured with. For example, if you create a web application for the domain name “www.mywebsite.com” , the root application will be accessible at the following address: http://www.mywebsite.com/. Site collections added to the root site are called “Sub Sites” or Sub Site Collections. They are, by default, located at specified subdirectories under the /Sites/ directory. In example, if you create a sub site called “SubSite1”, it might be located at: http://www.mywebsite.com/Sites/SubSite1/.

Site Collection:

A site collection is exactly as its name implies a collection of items that make up a site. In SharePoint, the distinction of Site Collection is used to provide a logical container in which permissions and/or configuration options may be applied. Permissions may also be inherited from parent to child collections as organized inside a web application. As you can imagine, this makes management of corporate sites much easier as delegation of site management (or more precisely, site collection management) can be delegated to various business units where they can manage their own permission levels, workflows, and configurations.

Now that we understand the semantics between Web Applications and Site Collections, let’s go ahead and create our Web Application. We want to click the “Create or extend Web Application” link as shown in Figure 2.0.

Figure 2.0 – Central Admin: Application Management

Figure 3.0 – Create or Extend Web Application

On this screen, we must choose between creating and extending a Web application. We want, for the purpose of this exercise, to select “Create a new Web Application”. The other option is used for exposing content, already setup in a web application, under a different web application. Why would we do this? A good example is when you want to have two different security schema’s applied to the same content.

Say for example, out on the Internet, you’d like your general traffic to access the site anonymously. In other words, they do not have to authenticate with a username and password in order to view your site content. However, let’s say you have a group of people, who will also be accessing your site, who are authorized to edit content. If you turn anonymous access off, your general public will not be able to view your site. However, if you do not turn it off, your editing users will not be able to authenticate, and therefore, will never be given the permissions they need to edit content. So what do you do?

Extend your site. J

One site collection can be Anonymous access only with the Integrated Authentication turned off. Then, under a different web application, you can extend this collection where anonymous is turned off, and integrated authentication is turned on. Give your authorized editors the address of the second web application and you are good to go!

On the “Create New Web Application” Page (figure 4.0), we can see it’s a mean looking form. However, if we take a little bit of time to break down the elements and explain them, you’ll find it isn’t quite as scary as you may think.

Figure 4.0 – Create New Web Application Page